Right. It's not a good thing. But what you describe is not a human disaster, while the loss of any one of many ocean fish species would be. On the other hand, don't get the idea that by calling a cut merely a cut, I am thereby advocating death by a thousand cuts. All I am doing is pointing out what our conservation priorities should be.
Sad truth is, at some point, you simply cannot afford to lose certain species.
Right. Let's concentrate on those species, first. There's no rhyme or reason to the causes championed by environmentalists, because they don't consider a species' utility to humans as being part of its value.
And I agree, we cannot afford to lose most fish species. As someone else has already pointed out, fish protein is typically what gets put into chickenfeed.
Right. That was I.
True. I think part of the trick is to learn to distinguish between environmentalists and ecologists.
Environmentalists are those who tend (although not always) to see the environment as almost being some sort quasi-mystical entity whose rules and regulations must always be obeyed. Failure to obey those rules is considered to be a moral failure.
Ecologists, on the other hand, are those who try to understand the natural workings of the natural world. And understand that the environment has its own version of the free market system: the flow of energy between different organisms.